Posted
by
samzenpus
on Monday February 17, 2014 @06:09PM
from the I-don't-want-to-hear-it dept.

First time accepted submitter EwanPalmer writes "YouTube is threatening to remove the account of a scientist who made a series of videos debunking claims made in an AIDS denialist movie over copyright infringement disagreement. Myles Power is claiming the producers of controversial 2009 documentary House of Numbers are attempting to censor him by submitting bogus DMCA claims against him. He says his movies do not breach copyright laws because his films are educational and therefore fair use. The 'AIDS denialist' documentary makers say they instead amounted to 'propaganda.'"

YouTube said that Power's account, which has more than 20,000 subscribers, will be removed on 18 February unless they receive a counter-notification disputing these claims against him by that date.

All they have to do is follow the law, file a counter-notification and this all goes away. The summary makes it look like YouTube is the bad guy when all they are doing is following the law and acting on the DMCA claims. It is up to the alleged infringer to counter-claim not the service provider.

He says his movies do not breach copyright laws because his films are educational and therefore fair use.

Google doesn't care. They breach their immunity if they don't follow the DMCA process, which involves the counter-notice. He shouldn't tell them anything, he should send in the proper counter-notice and make the denialists sue him then trounce them in court along with counter-suit for damages and legal fees.

If he's not willing to defend what he produced he just doesn't care enough.

That is a problem only if it actually gets to court. Filing a counter-claim costs nothing and the copyright holder may not file as it is obvious there is no infringement. Many copyright holders will file the first step of the process but never file with a court. The know that can scare some people into submission. Just follow the process, stand up to the bullies and they slink away.Even if it goes to court there are many organisation such as the EFF which will fund this kind of defense. I bet many AIDS grou

It's been a few weeks since I read the DMCA, but as I recall the counter-notice just has to say that you're contesting it. You don't have to go into any legal theory of why. It just shows that a) you're responding and b) don't agree that you've infringed.

Right. If you have enough copyright claims against you that are not disputed, youtube will simply remove your account.

This guy pissed off some folks who are making claims in bad faith, but if you're sure you're not violating the law you need to state so in a counter claim. At that point, it's no longer legal to file further DMCA takedown notices on the same material, and they have to take you to court to proceed. Multiple claims on the same clip [arstechnica.com] are considered misrepresentation. This is why it's suspicious

I watched the 16 minutes first part. There are maybe 2 minutes of original video at the start and 2 more minutes of a Foo Fighter music video, leaving about 10 minutes of House of Number material.

He really did a convincing work on the montage and the voice-over, but NPOV must agree the majority of the video came from the deniers. Now I don't know how far fair use goes, but maybe they really have a case there. How did MST3K handle that?

The fact that there was commentary over almost all of the video makes it fair use. There is a very old case that makes this clear.Folsom v. Marsh [yalelawtech.org]

no one can doubt that a reviewer may fairly cite largely from the original work, if his design be really and truly to use the passages for the purposes of fair and reasonable criticism. On the other hand, it is as clear, that if he thus cites the most important parts of the work, with a view, not to criticise, but to supersede the use of the original work, and substitute the review for it, such a use will be deemed in law a piracy.

It is clear that the vidios are criticism and do not supersede the original work.

He really did a convincing work on the montage and the voice-over, but NPOV must agree the majority of the video came from the deniers. Now I don't know how far fair use goes, but maybe they really have a case there. How did MST3K handle that?

None of which is any concern of Youtube. They have absolutely nothing to say about fair use or not. They follow the letter of the law as written and preserve their Safe Harbor protections under the DMCA. Youtube's actions are out of their hands on both sides unless they are willing to jump into the fray and assume liability.

Google doesn't have to find anything fair use. The only thing they need is to receive a counter notice. With a counter notice, Google can put the video back, and whatever copyright infringement happened or hasn't happened has nothing to do with Google.

Thats right. And they have 14 days to put the content back up after the counter claim else google doesn't get the automatic protections from damages in the DMCA from taking the content down. However, i believe their TOS already protects them.

This shows how little you know about the DMCA process. The provider does not make any determination. All they do is put the material back up unless the original claimant files suit and notifies the service provider. It is up to the courts to determine infringement not the service provider. By not filing a counter-notice the poster is not following the procedure.

No, it doesn't work that way. The same person can't issue a takedown for the same thing repeatedly. Claim, counter-claim, then it's up forever until sued for. The same person can't continue to re-file. And they can't get someone to file for them without risking running afoul of the rules on claims only being made by copyright holders.

No, it doesn't work that way. The same person can't issue a takedown for the same thing repeatedly. Claim, counter-claim, then it's up forever until sued for.

In reality.... they probably can, and Google is unlikely to notice that it's the same person that issued the second notice.
The same copyright holder may also have a second agent acting on their behalf to send the second takedown notice.

Nothing prevents them from sending the second letter.
Nothing prevents Google from making the mistake of failing

Nope. Just like the take-down is unverified, the counter-claim is also unverified. It does open up the poster to legal liabilities, but no more than the initial post. DMCA is about protecting the hosting entity, not the poster or copyright holder.

The TOS being complained about here is that if you don't defend your takedowns, then YouTube presumes you are a habitual offender, and it's easier for them to ban you permanently. If you post "questionable" content, be prepared to counter-notice. If you are going to post and run, then be prepared for the punishment when you violate the TOS.

There's no liability for YouTube here at all. They get notice, it comes down. They get counter-notice it comes back up. YouTube *Can't* be sued for that. They (coul

You're quite clueless on the topic I see. Youtube's policy on takedowns goes above and beyond DMCA in an effort to placate large copyright holders. Complaint maker is in fact the person evaluating the counter claim and he can simply deny it. There is no recourse other than to sue after that, and even that would not be a guarantee of getting your video back on youtube - you could only sue for damages. Youtube itself is a private entity that has a right to take down anyone's video at any time for any reason i

Then YouTube isn't DMCA compliant, and is openeing themselves up to liability, even if the content was "illegal". I'd heard it described as DMCA compliant, and don't host anything questionable enough to find out on my own. DMCA doesn't allow a counter-claim to be evaluated. The reason it takes 14 days for a counter-claim to re-instate a work is to give the complaintant time to file a restraining order. If YouTube doesn't follow that, they can be successfully sued by a poster, even if the poster posted i

DMCA "compliant" means that it's protected from copyright holders. Not that it grants rights to people posting videos. You appear to think that "DMCA compliant" means "follows DMCA to the letter, including all the rights granted to consumers". You could not be more wrong on the matter.

What it actually means is "it satisfies the party that can actually try to remove safe harbour status and sue for damages based on lack of it". I.e. copyright holders. People who are posting videos on youtube are not a part of

To be specific. They will follow the counter claim. But counter claim is reviewed by the one who made the claim, who can simply reject the counter claim. Poster of the video has no legal leg to stand on, as youtube is a private service that claims a right to remove any video for any reason it deems necessary. It has not obligation whatsoever to the poster to keep their videos up.

Content ID (Nintendo's use of automated detection of game cut scenes in Let's Play videos) and OCILLA notices of claimed infringement are two separate systems. I've faced both, and YouTube's OCILLA process is pretty much point-for-point 17 USC 512. Your beef is with Content ID.

The process is exactly the same for both. The only difference is that content ID allows automatic matching, whereas claims are done manually. Both the process of making the claim and rejecting it remain largely the same.

I'm guessing you simply were facing someone who caved or wasn't serious about their claims. If someone makes a serious claim and can provide proof that they do indeed own the copyright, the only tool available to you as a poster is to stir up negative publicity and hope that is enough to mak

You do not understand the process at all. Here are the steps.1. DMCA take down notice. Content comes down.2. DMCA counter Notice. Content goes up in 10-14 days unless step 3 is done.3. Original complainant file suit in court and notifies content provider with case number.

Complaint maker is in fact the person evaluating the counter claim

False. The courts evaluate the claim after step 3. The content provider can to put the content back up based on the existence of a counter claim and be free of liability.

There is no recourse other than to sue after that, and even that would not be a guarantee of getting your video back on youtube

You don't have to sue to get your content up. They have to sue to keep

I file a DMCA takedown on something of yours.You file the appropriate counter-claim to have it put back up.I sue you into oblivion because my bank account is larger than yours.

I get friends from the EFF and other anti-censorship groups to fund trial.We submit a simple motion for summary judgement based on fair use as commentary citing Folsom v. Marsh [yalelawtech.org]. The almost continual voice over makes it obvious commentary.You lose trial and I am awarded costs.Your bank account is much smaller.

...this has nothing to do with the government. Nobody here is "the government" - it's just three private parties arguing over who's shit got posted to youtube.

Unless we're talking about the government that passed the DMCA into law, or that established copyright in the first place, or that runs the courts where this would go if they file a DMCA counter-claim. You could have made a valid point that copyright is also established in the constitution, however.

The joke of course is just how much content on YT clearly violates copyright but just sits there for years. I mean entire major motion pictures [youtube.com] will be posted by some non-rights-holding Joe Shmoe, remain up for years, and get recommended to you by YT's algorithms and have ads run before they show it to you. So you go ahead and post a short clip from, say, The Jackie Gleason Show from 1960, Jackie Gleason Enterprises sends in a DCMA by the next day, it gets taken down, (fair enough) and YT has the absolute gall to send you a "you're a naughty boy!" email and ask you to watch this oh-so-amusing copyright drivers-ed film [youtube.com] which declares pretty much anything not 100% original content is a violation of the rules, while pretty much the vast majority of the content on the site does exactly that.

So the poor analogy is this: kids throwing rocks at the old factory windows in full view of the police. If the factory owner calls the police and complains, the kids are promptly arrested. If the owner says nothing the police gather a crowd around inviting people to watch the kids smash the windows, then mills through the crowd selling tickets to the policeman's ball.

The guy who was filing the complaints commented on the site. So maybe he's a dick, sure. But if you're willing to give him good faith for his complaint--solely in the capacity that he honestly believes that the video oversteps fair use, and is violating copyright--then he did follow correct procedure.

He tried contacting the guy quite a few times (or so he claims), and after getting no response, he filed the takedown request personally, not through some automated thing. If he has good reason to honestly believe that his rights were violated, it wasn't even perjury. Strangely enough that's what I would do if I thought someone was violating my copyright.

Claiming fair use for informational purposes is really shaky ground. There's a lot of "I know it when I see it", and people like to stretch the definition on either side. I haven't seen the video so I don't know how long the clips are, but if they are too long then yes it's a violation, and I suspect that (much like with parody) there's a line between "informational purposes" and "openly hostile" that the law says you shouldn't cross. Does it cross the line? Hell if I know, but the guy sounds like he's at least justified in filing a claim. Whether a court would find it reasonable or not is up to them, but jackasses get to protect their own rights too.

He tried contacting the guy quite a few times (or so he claims), and after getting no response, he filed the takedown request personally, not through some automated thing. If he has good reason to honestly believe that his rights were violated, it wasn't even perjury.

If he actually didn't try to take down any straight copy of those videos on YouTube, and went after one video using pieces of his work as commented-on quotations, it's at least highly suspicious, don't you think?

Not at all. A straight copy simply means an opportunity for more people to see his work, which authors normally want. On the other hand someone taking it apart and cutting it up, 'remixing' it to make the author look bad (and whether you think it's justified or not that is clearly what was done) is not something the author normally wants to see.

So no, not suspicious at all, perfectly normal and expected.

The real question here is whether the hostile piece does fall within fair use or not, and that is unfortunately a very complicated legal question, ultimately based on somewhat subjective criteria, so it's not easy to know for sure. It may well require a court to make that determination, which means a lot of lawyer fees for both of the gentlemen involved.

If he has good reason to honestly believe that his rights were violated, it wasn't even perjury.

The perjury clause only applies when the claimant is not the owner of the original content or a legal representative for them. Whether or not the new content infringes -- in belief or in fact -- has no bearing on the matter. There is no penalty for flagging any and all content, no matter how clear its fair-use.

That confirms that the claimant should act in good faith, believing the material to be infringing. The court merely found that counter-claims of notices believed to have been sent in bad faith cannot simply be dismissed.

DMCA 17 U.S.C. 512(c)(3)(A)(v):

(v) A statement that the complaining party has a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.

The perjury clause is specific to only a portion of the next subsection (emphasis added).

DMCA 17 U.S.C. 512(c)(3)(A)(vi):

(vi) A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.

For someone to be "authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed", there has to be "an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed" in the first place. The representative of a copyright owner cannot credibly allege infringement and give no thought to the most common ways that a use is "not an infringement of copyright", as 17 USC 107 through 122 put it. If you're referring solely to what is and isn't "under penalty of perjury", material misrepresentation in bad f

Pretty much one or more of the above - it comes in different varieties. There are some flavors of denialism in Africa that claim [sourcewatch.org] the West even artificially created HIV to wipe out all black Africans.

"The drugs given to the children are toxic, known to cause genetic mutation, organ failure, bone marrow death, bodily deformations, brain damage and fatal skin disorders. If the children refuse the drugs, they’re held down and force fed. Should they continue to resist, they’re taken to Columbia University Presbyterian hospital, where a surgeon puts

What does this mean exactly? Does it deny that AIDS exists? Does it deny that HIV leads to AIDS? Does it deny that non-gay people or non-Africans can get AIDS? Does it say it's all a government conspiracy and really caused by chemtrails?

One way or another, it doesn't sound like something that warrants debunking, but then again, I'm often surprised at just how stupid people can be.

It's not possible to find a single party line, but these are the most common beliefs AFAIK:

AIDS is caused by chemicals, big pharma, the government, the Bilderberg group, the Illuminati, space lizards, etc.HIV either does not exist, or exists and is harmless, or exists and is harmful and created by evil men in their evil laboratories but does not cause AIDS.Chemtrails could totally cause AIDS, but more evidence is needed. In other words some dude on the internet needs to write a speculative blogpost that claims that chemtrails cause AIDS before we can say with certainty that it does.

If you think this is harmless stupidity, think again. IIRC there is at least one case of an HIV positive mother who refused to test her child. The child later died in an illness with symptoms like those of someone who has AIDS. The mother also died, naturally.

If you think this is harmless stupidity, think again. IIRC there is at least one case of an HIV positive mother who refused to test her child. The child later died in an illness with symptoms like those of someone who has AIDS. The mother also died, naturally.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. In South Africa, HIV denialists advised by the Duesberg cult were in charge of public health policy for several years, leading to a tragedy of genocidal proportions:

Having just watched the videos in question, one of the people interviewed in the videos they're debunking is Christina Maggiore. She is now dead and, at the time of shooting, her three year old daughter was already dead. Both are dead as a result of AIDs by competent medical accounts. She ran an organization: Alive and Well AIDs Alternatives, which was dedicated to convincing people not to test for AIDs or take antiretrovirals. In the case the death of her daughter (who was born from an AIDs infected mother

The most common view I've heard about is denying that HIV and AIDS are related to each other, without any stated conspiracy theory attached other than that scientists were wrong and jumping to conclusions.

Drs Duesberg Rasnick and Farmer dont exist in your world, right? And certainly Dr Mullis (the inventor of the PCR test used in AIDS clinics worldwide) never existed, right?

Duesberg...that was the guy who had a role in all those AIDS deaths in South Africa, right? Isn't he also the guy who got pimp-slapped by multiple peer reviewers and investigated for scientific misconduct?

Rasnick...Rasnick...oh yeah, he was the dude who illegally set up clinical trials where he recruited poor black HIV+ individuals and instructed them to forgo antivirals in favor of "VitaCell cures AIDS" vitamin supplements.

Farmer? Never heard of him.

Mullis - the Nobel Prize winning chemist who dropped a boatload of acid in the 60s and claims he's encountered aliens and also believes in astrology.

Yep, nothing low rent about those guys.

Without any opinion at all on which side is right about the disease...

Sure there are people who have other hypotheses but they have been refuted by research.Duesberg [wikipedia.org] claims have been refuted..Rasnick's [wikipedia.org] never actually researched AIDS and has made false claims of University affiliation.Farmer [google.ca] wrote a book to refute the claim that AIDS came from Haiti.Mullis [wikipedia.org] has also done no actual research into HIV/AIDS. He is also a molecular biologist and infectious diseases is outside his area of expertise.

The declaration has been signed by over 5,000 people, including Nobel prizewinners, directors of leading research institutions, scientific academies and medical societies, notably the US National Academy of Sciences, the US Institute of Medicine, Max Planck institutes, the European Molecular Biology Organization, the Pasteur Institute in Paris, the Royal Society of London, the AIDS Society of India and the National Institute of Virology in South Africa. In addition, thousands of individual scientists and doctors have signed, including many from the countries bearing the greatest burden of the epidemic. Signatories are of MD, PhD level or equivalent, although scientists working for commercial companies were asked not to sign

"Mullis has also done no actual research into HIV/AIDS. He is also a molecular biologist and infectious diseases is outside his area of expertise."This is hilarious and typical of the character assassination.

True, he's a molecular biologist. His expertise? He INVENTED the modern PCR test! Go look that up. It's actually a pretty big deal, there's a little something called the Nobel prize he got for that specifically.

Now he may not be a board certified specialist in infectious diseases but he is certainly qua

First, PCR isn't a test, it's a technique for generating copies of DNA. It's used to amplify a sample of DNA for various reasons. One of those reasons may be to amplify a sample to make it easier to detect HIV RNA or transcripted DNA. As far as I know, it's not typically used in AIDs clinics. The expertise and equipment required is usually found in more sophisticated labs. Most clinics are going to be using simpler tests and sending out blood or referring patients if they need more sophisticated testing.

Worse because the "cocktails" used - many of which he trialed and rejected in his pioneering cancer research - are toxic and cause great damage in and of themselves.

This is ancient history. The modern anti-HIV cocktails are largely drugs that were invented long after Duesberg's research career fizzled out, and as far as I know were never considered for use against cancer. AZT was indeed very toxic, not unlike chemotherapy - but AZT isn't front-line treatment against AIDS and hasn't been for many years, at least not in the US.

His hypothesis may well be wrong, but simply being wrong would not justify the negative reaction he has received.

No, but being wrong and continuing to say the same thing over and over again for decades is a pretty good way to piss people off. And traveling to South Africa to meet with Mbeki and advocate against trying to cure the millions of South Africans with AIDS, well, that's just sick.

Oh, btw, where is that cure?

For people who can afford to pay for the treatment, AIDS basically is cured - we can't totally eliminate HIV from the system, but patients can survive almost indefinitely with a reasonable quality of life. Those therapies were developed by ignoring lunatics like Duesberg and targeting the molecular mechanisms of HIV. We don't have a cure for the flu either, despite knowing about it for much long than HIV, but that doesn't mean that mainstream science is wrong about the flu virus.

Over the past decade or so I understand there has been a shift away from the ones he was writing about to less toxic drugs

Longer than that; the search for HIV-specific drugs has been going on since the 1980s. The first antiretroviral came out the same year (1987) that Duesberg made his first complaint; new HIV therapies started to hit the market in the mid-1990s. The reason we didn't have anything sooner wasn't because doctors enjoy giving AZT to patients, it's because developing new drugs is not a famous

How are we doing on that war on cancer? How about the flu? Polio is still holding on in a few spots.

HIV is a retrovirus, it writes it into the cell's nucleas, even replicating as the cell replicates, until some event happens to cause the cell to start producing viral bodies again. It's basically a stealth virus.

It turns out that 'curing HIV' is bloody difficult. For that matter, just creating a vaccine for it is very difficult. Best study I remember thus far reduced the chance of infection by 50% - not

Your chronology is wrong though, along with your cause and effect. He was only mildly skeptical and his career was trashed.

He was not sceptical in many of his original statements. He was quite emphatic that HIV did not cause aids and there were many other causes. He argued well enough to cause South Africa to follow his ideas.

We were told we would have a cure and/or a vaccine.

You keep saying that yet I see no evidence of anyone actually uttering or writing those words. There were references to it eventually being cured but 20 years research into a retrovirus is still a pretty short time.

treating them like scientists who are supposed to remain skeptical, rather than priests who are supposed to remain orthodox, would not have hurt and might well have helped.

Tell that to the 330,000 South Africans who died because the Government took the advice of a

Perhaps you should read things that take Duesberg head on [wikipedia.org]. You will find that people have looked into his theories and found them wanting.

His hypothesis may well be wrong, but simply being wrong would not justify the negative reaction he has received.

That his hypothesis is wrong is not the issue. The fact that he still hold those hypotheses long after that have been scientifically prove wrong is the issue. It is quite possible that he does not want to admit he was wrong because that would mean he was instrumental in the deaths of 330,000 South Africans who died due to the government taking his advice.

A lot of prestige and not just individuals but big institutions, government, media, research funding institutes, had just announced that HIV=AIDS and now that we knew what was causing it the cure was assured.

I am honestly not sure if you think you are putting one past me or if you think this makes sense.

There is no cure for the common cold because the "common cold" is actually a symptom with over 200 different possible causes, and it's a mild nuisance not worth the trouble. If one of them started killing people tomorrow I expect a vaccine at least, if not a full cure, would appear very quickly.

There are some tests regarding allowing parents legal guardianship of their offspring. Generally speaking, if you let one die through total, idiotic negligence they take any others from you. Also, if you're too crazy to care for them and one dies due to that insanity, they take any others from you. Christina Maggiore breast-fed her daughter knowing that she (Christina) had been diagnosed as HIV-positive. She also didn't have her children vaccinated or tested for HIV or treated for HIV when seriously ill wit

With any conspiracy theory, there's ample room for people to ask questions, and parts that don't on first look seem to support the explanation. The bigger the thing being explained, the more details people bring up that seem inconsistent. 9/11, Obama's citizenship, HIV, the moon landing... people spend enough time looking into something convinced that there's a conspiracy going

On the other hand, the Perth group IIRC actually argues that there is no such thing as HIV at all. They challenge the claim that it's ever been properly isolated, and the best I recall they basically argue that what is being detected as HIV is simply cellular trash of a kind typical of an individual with severely compromised immunities.

This is another good example of being decades behind and/or batshit insane. HIV is one of the best-characterized viruses in history - the genome, structure, and pathology ha

There are several different alternative hypotheses, for instance Duesberg argues that HIV is harmless, a very weak virus that is found only in the blood of people experiencing immune collapse (for some other reason) because a healthy immune system wipes it out immediately. Just an opportunistic infection that can be used as a diagnostic.

On the other hand, the Perth group IIRC actually argues that there is no such thing as HIV at all. They challenge the claim that it's ever been properly isolated, and the best I recall they basically argue that what is being detected as HIV is simply cellular trash of a kind typical of an individual with severely compromised immunities.

So you believe which of those two contrary hypothoses? They can't both be right. Do you just add them together and say: "Well, they both think that the mainstream science that actually has a good handle on all of this must be wrong so, if both agree on that, then they must be right, even though their basic theories disagree in other respects"? Seriously? "Denialist" may be a slur word, but if it also accurately describes reasoning like that, it would seem to be justified.

once they feel confident in a conclusion it becomes like a religious dogma. Once they have a council and get all the archbishops to agree on this conclusion it is in their eyes forever true and beyond question.

Care to highlight some examples of this behavior?

Science is a method for ascertaining reality. One that presumes and requires the very skepticism that the priests fight as a mortal enemy.

"Racist" is not a meaningless term. Yes, it is sometimes misapplied, but calling it meaningless in light of the whole of human history and the present day is a monumental mis-statement (to be kind about it).

He also (apparently) refuses to issue a formal counter-claim asserting they do not violate copyright. If they are fair use, he can counter-claim and be done with it (until they sue him). He's effectively acknowledging that he's violating copyright by refusing to contest the assertions.

However Youtube can just take down the videos, they are under no obligation to host anything. To them it's simpler to do the take down than to step forward and fight legal battles on the behalf of someone else.

Google (or any hosting provider) is obliged, under the DMCA, to pull his video unless he submits that counter-claim, or else face liability should the copyright holder want to sue. While you and I can pontificate as much as we want as to whether it's fair use (and we're probably right), most hosting providers, as a matter of policy, would rather not be dragged into court and risk losing in the first place.

Discussing parts of legally released copyright code on the other hand is fair use. You know, like discussing parts of legally released movie.

You are totally right, however you do not need the "legally" qualification here. Many Americans don't seem to realise exactly how strong the "fair use" rules are. This is one of the few remaining areas where US law is clearly more pro-freedom than most European law. This is because the fair use rules are not actually rules. They are a direct representation of the first amendment acting on copyright law. The first amendment gives you the absolute right to freedom of political speech. If you need to sho

You should read up on fair use. The purpose and character of the use is the first of four factors in deciding whether fair use applies. A simple copy is merely *derivative*, not *transformative [wikipedia.org]*.

It is fair use to excerpt a video for educational purposes, and specifically --- to illustrate exactly what parts your criticism is about, and to crystalize in the minds of the viewers: portions relevant to the discussion in order to substantiate which claims are being debunked.

Educational use is one of the fundamental uses of the Fair Use doctrine, as long as there is no commercial gain derived directly from the application of Fair Use.Quoting from 17 U.S.C 107:

Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 17 U.S.C. 106 and 17 U.S.C. 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include:

the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;

the nature of the copyrighted work;

the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and

the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

So... this use is valid on the grounds that it is criticism (in both of the main definitions of the word), comment, and teaching, if the person applying the Fair Use doctrine is not claiming any direct commercial benefit from the use of said copyrighted information. Unless, of course, the original authors can show that the original work is of a specific nature that would itself invalidate Fair Use; the re-user had included all or the vast majority of the original piece directly in his response; or the re-use substantially affected the commercial value of the original work (probably requires a before/after study of revenue generated from the work to be presented in justification for the copyright claim, not something that can be submitted with a DCMA request).

In this case, both sides will probably feel justified in labeling the other's position as "propaganda", with their own as "education", although it shows the AIDS-deniers' viewpoint and world view as being very narrow, because "any view other than something that completely aligns with mine is incorrect, and worse propaganda, so must be expunged from view so that my Universal Truth can be seen in all its glory"...

i see nothing wrong with denier labels. it is deliberately ignoring and twisting facts and science to serve a political agenda. i had never heard of aids denier. but another great example is climate change denier.

Using the term denier to compare people to Holocaust deniers trivializes the Holocaust.

About 12 million people died in Nazi death camps, about six million of them Jews. AIDS has resulted in about 30 millions deaths [wikipedia.org]. So far. Thabo Mbeki [wikipedia.org] may be responsible for more deaths than Heinrich Himmler [wikipedia.org].

People do not consider it trivializing because of the numbers, but because of the natures of the two things. There is a big difference between the spread of a disease that impacts a significant but still small percentage of the population and the systematic industrial scale attempt at exterminating a large group of people.

Neither TFS, TFA or GP talks about the holocaust, only you do.There are plenty other types of deniers, like evolution or global warming."Denier" is just a word used to describe somebody who denies what the vast majority accepts as fact.Denying the use of a word serves nobody except those apposed to discussion.

LOL, this is the first time Ive ever heard of AIDS deniers. No Shit? Some dumbass shoved a tinfoil hat up his ass and rationalized somehow that AIDS doesnt exist? I was in school in the 70s when a friend of mine figured out he was gay, got a divorce, moved to Frisco, contracted AIDS and died. The Rock Hudson jokes were still warm. I can understand that there are holocost deniers, because I have met enough Nazis and Klan Klowns to understand stupid is; as stupid does.I wanna see the oxygen deniers, or penis

I've watched the videos. The problem is that they have lots of reasons to think that they can push a claim through some courts. That's not to say that they have a valid claim, but he modern yardstick is whether they can get some judge to buy it, not whether they're actually in the right. The video content of the first two videos is almost entirely footage from the video they're debunking. A lot of it is the same clips repeated multiple times and there's plenty of extra content in the form of a voice-over cr

DMCA means EVERYTHING to YouTube. If they follow the DMCA procedure, they have safe harbor from both copyright holders and from people falsely accused of infringement. That protection is worth billions to YouTube. The procedure they have to follow to get that protection is:

Upon receipt of a complaint, temporarily remove the video and notify the person who posted it.

When the poster responds saying they don't believe it's infringing, put the video back up.

That second part is called "counter notice". You may have noticed in TFA it said YouTube may lock the account if he doesn't send them a counter notice. He simply needs to quit whining for ten minutes, long enough to type up a counter notice email.

Belief in belief is a terrible thing. It would be nice if we could set those people down and force them to choose between injecting HIV+ blood into themselves, or admitting that they don't actually believe in what they are saying.

If they really believe, they should volunteer for such a scientific study. Then they should change their minds when they get the disease.